Interested in blogging for timesofindia.com? We will be happy to have you on board as a blogger, if you have the knack for writing. Just drop in a mail at toiblogs@timesinternet.in with a brief bio and we will get in touch with you.

The ‘Strong Leader’ Disease: When India is federal, why are its political parties still run by high commands?

If BJP – which earlier seemed well ahead of the pack in UP – finally loses out to the SP-Congress alliance in the state, it will be one more pointer to the failure of our political leadership to grasp the reality of federal India. Our parties are organised in unitary structures, with power being centralised in “high commands”, when our polity is federated. This is true as much of the national parties (BJP, Congress, CPM, BSP, etc) as the regional parties, which too are one-leader or one-family run parties.

Over the long term national parties are bound to decline, never mind their periodic rise to glory, as happened with BJP in 2014. The simple reason for this is that in a federated polity, political parties must be equally federated to be regionally strong. Top-down parties, whether at the national or regional levels, will ultimately shrink, for India is too big to be driven from above, whether this centre happens to be in Delhi (for India as a whole), or in Mumbai (for Maharashtra) or Chennai (for Tamil Nadu).

The reason why national parties face their toughest opposition from regional parties is also this over-centralisation. But regional parties are also fraying at the edges for want of strong sub-regional leaders. Consider this reality: barring a handful, most states have seen, or are even now seeing, coalitions.

The mere existence of a coalition in a state suggests that the voter is seeking more direct empowerment of local leaders. Regional parties in some of the larger states may thus need a federated leadership structure to succeed in all regions of the state. An occasional strong leader (a Modi at the Centre, a Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, or a Mamata Banerjee in Bengal), may buck the federal trend, but they are likely to be exceptions.

While one is not predicting that BJP will lose UP, the reason why it is huffing and puffing to win what seemed like a sure bet just two months ago is the party’s inability to create and project a local leadership in a large and diverse state. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no doubt an asset to the party, he is not going to be running UP even if the party wins.

The easy gains in 2014 (Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and J&K) made the BJP leadership believe that Modi’s popularity was enough to win most states. In 2014, the Modi wave was still strong and the opposition in disarray. But post-2014, the party hasn’t won a single state without projecting a leader (it lost Delhi and Bihar badly, and won Assam handsomely only with a CM candidate).

If it loses UP, it will be this factor that killed its hopes. The electorate knows it will get Akhilesh Yadav as chief minister if the SP-Congress coalition wins, but it is not sure what will emerge from the black box if BJP wins.

BJP’s pre-2014 wins were all the result of strong local leadership – Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan, Shivraj Singh Chauhan in MP, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, and Manohar Parrikar in Goa apart from Modi himself in Gujarat. The party’s emergence as the single-largest group in Delhi’s 2013 elections was also due to local leadership, with Harsh Vardhan leading the pack. Despite lacking in charisma, Vardhan did well for the party.

Congress lost its premier status in Indian politics primarily because it wanted to decide state-level leadership from Delhi. BJP too will meet the same fate in many states if it believes that state leaders are created from above. Far from being the primary pole of national politics, BJP will reduce itself to a bunch of regional satrapies after the rise of aggressive challengers like AAP, which is expected to make a strong showing in Goa and Punjab, and possibly next in Gujarat itself towards the end of 2017.

But the disease isn’t restricted to Congress and BJP alone. Despite ruling only one state, AAP is becoming as centralised as BJP and Congress right now, with Arvind Kejriwal being its all-powerful boss. It is not a happy augury for its future, even if it wins a few more states.

Our Constitution says India is a “Union of States” but our national and regional political parties do not seem to have read this, or grasped its import for how parties themselves should be organised. They have allowed the reality of the last 70 years – where one party ruled at the Centre most of the time, and the same reality was replicated in states – to cloud their visions.

The emergence of a strong BJP under Modi has furthered the same idea, that strong leaders make for strong national parties. The truth is different: parties need strong leaders in the states, and also at sub-state levels. In Maharashtra, for example, the national parties need strong leaders at the metro-level, as much as at sub-regional levels, in Vidarbha, Marathwada, etc.

The only logical way to ensure this is by holding real internal elections for deciding leaders, but right now most regional leaders are anointed from the top. In Gujarat, for example, Vijay Rupani, the BJP chief minister, was decided by the party leadership and not elected through a real contest in the state legislature party. This automatically reduces his authority within the party, and militates against the emergence of a true local leadership in a federated party.

The writing on the wall for national parties is clear: federate, federate, federate.